Openlab, a collaboration between CERN and five companies to develop technology to underpin the Large Hadron Collider experiment, will next concentrate on challenges such as cloud computing.Openlab, which involves collaborative research between CERN and HP, Huawei, Intel, Oracle, and Siemens, officially went into its fourth phase on Wednesday.

Oracle today released its Enterprise Kernel Release 2 for Oracle Linux that features support for the mainline Linux 3 and btrfs and reportedly offers fastest performance on Intel systems. Linux Containers and DTrace are also offered as technology previews but not commercially supported

HP has unveiled a project to bring two disparate chip architectures closer together, announcing some high-end x86-based servers while also working some of its high-end features for Itanium into x86 software

HP and Intel have a "secret" deal to keep Itanium alive, Oracle has alleged.The claim, part of an ongoing legal battle between Oracle and HP, was filed on Friday with the Superior Court of the State of California.

Oracle has brought out expansion racks for its Exadata Database Machine to provide backups and additional processing capacity for data analytics on the appliance.The expansion racks, which went on sale on Tuesday, provide extra storage capacity and processing power for any of the X2-2 and X2-8 appliances.